Current HPS News

News

April, 2010

Congratulations to our amazing graduate students! Justin Sytsma was hired as an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at East Tennessee State University, Julia Bursten won an NSF fellowship, and Jonathan Livengood won an ACLS-Mellon fellowship!

December, 2009

The Department of History and Philosophy of Science is pleased to offer a one or two term Mellon Post Doctoral Fellowship in the period August 30, 2010---April 30, 2011. The Fellowship is to support a scholar with a clearly defined monograph project in some area of the history of science or history and philosophy of science. The successful candidate would, in addition to pursuing his or her research goals, be expected to teach one course each term centered on that research, and would grant the University of Pittsburgh Press the first option to publish the monograph. Senior scholars should apply for a single semester; junior scholars may apply for two semesters. The fellowship is in the amount of $40,000, and comes with a full package of benefits.

This Fellowship is funded as part of a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the development of publishing in the History and Philosophy of Science through University of Pittsburgh Press and interactions between the World History Center and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Special consideration will be given to applications that are consonant with the goals of those projects.

Application Deadline: February 15, 2010.Notification by: March 15, 2010. Acceptance required by: April 15, 2010.
Applications should include the following:
(1) A cover letter indicating that a Postdoctoral Fellowship is sought.
(2) A description of the project to be undertaken during residence (500-1000 words).
(3) A curriculum vitae.
(4) A sample of your written work.
(5) Names of three referees who can supply letters upon request.
Electronic versions of the application are strongly preferred and should be sent via email to: vanna@pitt.edu

October, 2009

Sandy Mitchell has just published her new book, Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy. Congrats! Get this great book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Congratulations to Rita Levine who was recently announced as the winner of the Michael Orosz Staff Award for Excellence!

Marcus Adams has published "Empirical evidence and the knowledge-that/knowledge-how distinction" in Synthese (Fall 2009);

Peter Gildenhuys has recently published "An explication of the causal dimension of drift" in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (Sept 2009);

Benny Goldberg has won a fellowship from the F.C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine Grant (for research at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia);

Lisa Lederer's "Imageability effects on sentence judgment by right brain-damaged adults" has been published by Aphasiology and her chapter "Simple heuristics for concept combinarion" is forthcoming in The Handbook of Compositionality;

Yoichi Ishida's "Sewall Wright and Gustave Malécot on Isolation by Distance" is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science and his "Transposable Elements and an Epigenetic Basis for Punctuated Equilibria" has been published in BioEssays (2009);

Jonathan Livengood has won the William James Prize of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (2009; with J. Sytsma);

Bryan Roberts's article "Group Structural Realism" has been accepted for publication by The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science;

Jonah Schupbach has published "On the alleged impossibility of Bayesian coherentism" in Philosophical Studies (Dec 2008), while "Is the conjunction fallacy tied to probabilistic confirmation?" is forthcoming in Synthese, a review of Strevens's Depth in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and a review of Sosa's Reflective Knowledge in The Review of Metaphysics;

Catherine Stinson published "Searching for the Source of Executive Attention" in PSYCHE (Jan 2009);

Justin Sytsma has won a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2009-2010, the William James Prize of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (2009; with J. Livengood) and a Graduate Student Paper Prize by the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division, 2009), and he has published "How to study folk intuitions about consciousness" in Philosophical Psychology (Jan 2009), while "Phenomenological Obviousness and the New Science of Consciousness" is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science, "The Proper Province of Philosophy: Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Investigation" in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, and "Philosophy and the Brain Sciences" in Iris: European Journal of Philosophy and Public Discourse;

Katie Tabb has published "The Debate Over Intelligent Design: What Would Darwin Say?" in Forbes on line and "Authority and Authorship in a 21st-Century Encyclopaedia and a 'Very Mysterious Foundation'" in eSharp, and she has won a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Allan Gotthelf has co-organized, with Bill Brewer of the University of Warwick, a workshop on Perception, Consciousness, and Reference, to be held at Warwick on September 18-20, 2009. Papers will be given by Charles Travis (London), Greg Salmieri (UNC-Chapel Hill), John Campbell (Berkeley), Imogen Dickie (NYU/Toronto), and Jason Rheins (Penn), with comments, respectively, by Tim Crane (Cambridge), Bill Brewer, Allan himself, Barry Stroud (Berkeley) and Quassim Cassam (Warwick). Additional participants include: Naomi Eilan, Johannes Roessler, and Matt Soteriou (all of Warwick), Matt Bateman (Penn), Ben Bayer (Colorado College), Christian Beenfeldt (Oxford/Copenhagen), David Charles (Oxford), Tara Smith (UT-Austin), and Paul Snowdon (London). It’s a closed workshop, but Allan will be happy to report on goings-on at the event to anyone interested, when he returns.

August, 2009

Congratulations to Holly Andersen and Peter Gildenhuys who have successfully defended their dissertation this summer! Good luck for your first year as Assistant Professors!

Congratulations to Jim Lennox, who has been invited to give several very prestigious lectures in the upcoming year. He will give the keynote Dyason Lecture at the Australian Association for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science on July 11, 2009 and the Westfall Lecture in the HPS Colloquium series at the University of Indiana in Fall, 2009. He will also be lecturing to the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in the Darwin year lecture series on November 11, 2009, and he will be the Biggs Resident Fellow at Washington University of St. Louis in March 2010!